Category Archives: Homer

On Homer’s Iliad Book VII

January 14, 2023 – 9:25 am

Book VII of the Iliad shows us the paradox of men at war who can still work together.

Street scene: a rooster walks down the road while, on his right side, a cat faces him. A minibus, car, and building are in the background, along with some greenery
Cock and cat on a village street
near a stream channelled between concrete walls
Tarabya, Sarıyer, Istanbul
Wednesday, January 11, 2023

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Maugham | Tagged | Comments (2)

Biological History

January 9, 2023 – 9:39 am

Sailboats and sun, seen through a mist and reflected in calm water
Tarabya Marina, Sarıyer, Istanbul
January 1, 2023

“As is the generation of leaves, so is that of humanity,” says Glaucus to Diomedes in the Iliad (Book VI, line 146, in Lattimore’s translation). However, leaves are normally considered biologically; humanity, historically. I touched on the distinction in the previous post; now I want to say more. I shall be looking again at R.G. Collingwood’s notion of biological history as a kind of mistake. Collingwood does not mention astrology, but it would seem to be an analogous mistake. A correlative mistake could be called historical biology and be a kind of social constructionism (unfortunately the Wikipedia article on the subject currently [January 8, 2022] “needs attention from an expert in Sociology,” and I am not one).

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, Maugham | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

On Homer’s Iliad Book VI

January 2, 2023 – 5:04 pm

View from a height (with tree branch in upper right corner): on the ground below, a settlement; beyond it, a bend in a strait (the Bosphorus); beyond that, the two sides of the straight, opening to a sea (the Black Sea)
Kireçburnu, Sarıyer, Istanbul
Friday, December 30, 2022

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By David Pierce | Tagged | Comments (4)

On Homer’s Iliad Book V

December 26, 2022 – 5:58 am

Tangles of rebar from a building demolition sit, with a backhoe on top, on a narrow street paved with setts
Creative destruction
Arpa Suyu Sokağı, Şişli, Istanbul
Thursday, December 22, 2022

In Book V of the Iliad, the battlefield deaths that started in Book IV continue. Some of them are caused by Diomedes.

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By David Pierce | Tagged , | Comments (2)

On Homer’s Iliad Book III

December 12, 2022 – 5:23 pm

Trunks of three mature trees on concrete wharf; strait beyond
Yeniköy (Νιχώρι) on the Bosphorus
Sarıyer, Istanbul, December 11, 2022
The Paphlagonians must have passed by here
on their way to join the Trojans
as they did according to Iliad II.851–5
as mentioned in the Wikipedia article “Cytorus”
created by me in 2010

In Book III of the Iliad, we learn about Menelaus, Paris, Hector, Helen, and Priam. Having learned about Agamemnon, Achilles, and Patroclus in the first two books, now we know all of the players in the following summary of the epic.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Maugham | Tagged , , | Comments (6)

On Homer’s Iliad Book II

December 4, 2022 – 9:34 pm

As I proposed last time, Achilles performs the greatest act in the Iliad by not killing Agamemnon in Book I. He then takes himself out of the action for a while. We are not going to see him again till Book IX, when he receives the embassy of Phoenix, Ajax, and Odysseus (chosen by Nestor in lines 168–9).

Benches and bare tree on wet concrete wharf by the Bosphorus under a cloudy sky
Kireçburnu, Sarıyer, Istanbul
Wednesday, November 30, 2022

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By David Pierce | Tagged , | Comments (7)

On Homer’s Iliad Book I

November 29, 2022 – 9:20 am

In Book I of the Iliad, Achilles restrains an impulse to run a sword through Agamemnon.

That may be the greatest act in the whole epic. I say so, having recently completed a reading of Njal’s Saga, which features a lot of impulsive killing. Now I am embarking on the Iliad again, a book at a time. Here I take up Book I and some comparisons with the saga.

I wrote here about Homer’s epic book by book between April, 2017, and September, 2019. I was reading Chapman’s Elizabethan translation. In my account of Book I from then, there are details that do not otherwise stand out to me now, when I am reading mainly Murray’s translation in the Loeb Classical Library, and comparisons with Njal’s Saga are in mind.

Bench on concrete wharf, looking out across a bay to the hills beyond; coast guard vessel in view
Sarıyer, Istanbul (European side)
Loeb Iliad, volume I
November 25, 2022

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By David Pierce | Tagged , , , | Comments (9)

Sacrifice and Simulation

September 26, 2022 – 11:04 am

Executive summary. An experiment has been performed to detect whether we are living in a simulation. The experiment is to tell Abraham to sacrifice his son. Whatever he does, he breaks a law. Thus there is more to the world than can be understood by natural science.

Beach, sparkling sea, mountains, clouds, sky
Altınova, Ayvalık, Balıkesir, Türkiye
Looking towards Lesbos, Greece
September 20, 2022

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, Philosophy | Tagged , , , | Comments (1)

Creativity

June 6, 2022 – 6:26 am

Index to this series

In the Platonic dialogues, Socrates frequently mentions τέχνη (technê), which is art in the archaic sense: skill or craft. The concern of this post is how one develops a skill, and what it means to have one in the first place.

Books quoted or mentioned in the text, by Midgley, Weil, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Byrne, Wittgenstein, Arendt, and Alexander

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, Education, Euclid, Midgley, Pirsig, Plato, Principles of Art, Thoreau | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (4)

Nature

October 8, 2021 – 10:29 am

Index to this series

Can Socrates really “find a natural support for justice,” as Allan Bloom says he must? It is strictly impossible, as I say in “Bloom, Badiou, Ryle, Shorey.” Inevitably there is more that can be said, and I shall try to say some of it here.

Sand, sea, mountains, sky
Anatolian sand, Aegean sea, Lesbian mountains
Uranus over all
Profesörler Sitesi, Altınova, Balıkesir, Turkey
September 24, 2021

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By David Pierce | Also posted in absolute presuppositions, Aristotle, Collingwood, Leo Strauss, Midgley, Plato | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (11)